The Last Child Walking to School

Since when was it reckless or dangerous for children to walk to school?

I’ve seen a lot of school construction projects where there is absolutely no way students could ever walk to school. Perhaps the most egregious of these is Huntington High School, serving Huntington, West Virginia. The prior Huntington High was situated on the edge of a residential neighborhood where many of the school students could walk to school. Then Huntington High and Huntington East High were consolidated into a new facility past the interstate (which was not permitted to go through town, rather it passes a few miles south of town) where few live and, even if they did, the situation of the school on top of a tall hill with a road traveling up to it lacking sidewalks hinders that opportunity.

Meanwhile, I was an elementary school student in the mid-1990s. I went to the same elementary school from grades one through seven. The school was about a half mile from my home. Every day I walked to and from school. For the first few years I walked with a babysitter and then as I grew older I either walked with friends or, gasp, by myself. I wouldn’t consider the neighborhood to be the best neighborhood, but it wasn’t a bad neighborhood either.

Walking to school taught me a number of things.

• Be careful around traffic. Look both ways before crossing the street.
• Wayfinding around and understanding who lived where in my neighborhood.
• Responsibility for myself: pay attention to my surroundings and act in a safe manner.

Your author in grade 3, no visible damage from playing in traffic

Building schools away from residential neighborhoods takes the opportunity for students to learn about navigating the world away from them (part of my theory why there are so many GPS-related gaffes), it removes an opportunity to be physically active, in many cases it increases the amount of time students spend neither at home nor in school, it has perpetual transportation costs that are almost always heavily subsidized by school districts, and I think it takes one more place for communities to come together away.

After reading Kids, Carpools, & Walking: How a Safety Mentality Creates Unsafe Spaces on streets.mn, I thankfully realized I’m not the only one with these concerns. Most dangerously I think we’re deferring the understanding of how to interact with traffic, public personal responsibility, and wayfinding until people are older and these concepts are less inherent.  At least, that’s my observation watching 17-year-old students at Pennsylvania’s flagship university step into traffic without so much as looking both ways. We’re also removing an opportunity for children to understand and get to know the environments they’re living in. The world is a far less scary place when you know who your neighbors are.